beta.edit-content.com

That said, next weekened we will be releasing the newest version of Surreal CMS.  We’ve already received incredible feedback from some of our users, but now it’s time to hear from the entire Surreal CMS community.

What to Expect in the New Release

Here are just some of the new features and enhancements that you can expect to see:

Improved User Interface / Icon Set

The general idea is the same, but we’ve made the CMS a lot cleaner and much more professional looking.  Now you can see at a glance how many webpages each site has and which websites editors are assigned to.  We also got a shiny new logo :)

Image Editor

Now you can resize, crop, flip, and rotate images right from the CMS:

Customizable Rich-text Editor Toolbar

Now with more options than ever!  You can easily enable or disable every feature in the toolbar on a per-editor basis.

Custom Paths for Images, Documents, and Media

Now you don’t have to worry about editors cluttering up the root directory with documents, images, and other files.  When you set custom paths, editors will only have access to those directories on the website.  (Websites > Configure > Advanced)

Edit CSS, JavaScript, and XML Files

Now you can enable CSS, JavaScript, and XML files as if they were regular webpages.  (Syntax highlighting is coming soon!)

Optional Welcome Email

Because sometimes it’s more convenient to send editors a welcome email yourself.  There is also a no-email option to reset editor passwords now.

Purge Webpage History

As a Designer, sometimes you may not want your editors to access certain page revisions.  Now you can purge one or all revisions of each webpage.

View Payment History (Pro Accounts Only)

Now you can see all of your payment history under the My Account tab.

During the Release

We really hope that you’ll enjoy all of the new features that we’ve been working on for you.  In the past, we’ve launched enhancements with virtually zero noticable downtime.  We plan on carrying on that same tradition on launch day next week, so you have little to worry about.

Speaking of launch day, the new version will be available a week from today on Saturday, January 23, 2010.

Update (23 January 2010): The new version is up and running, so go check it out!

Awesome news! Our online content management service Surreal CMS launched its affiliate program last week. If you have a Web Design blog or other website that a lot of designers and developers visit, you’ll definitely want to check it out.

Surreal CMS is offering $20 for each monthly subscriber and $100 for each annual subscriber that you refer. It’s free to sign up, there’s no minimum that you need to earn to get paid, and payments are sent via PayPal at the beginning of each month. For a content management system, these are some pretty generous commissions!

Once you’re signed up, you’ll get full access to the Affiliate Dashboard where you can get text links and banner ads to copy & paste into your website. You can also track your commission as your referrals sign up for the service.

If you’ve been looking for an easy way to earn some extra income from your website, the Surreal CMS Affiliate Program is exactly what you’ve been looking for!

After extensive searching online, I happened across a number of Windows GUIs, web-based versions, and some other not-so-useful-for-me Tidy interfaces. The best ones, of course, were the web-based versions, but most of them tried to give me so many options that it just wasn’t useful for my everyday use. Others just seemed a bit tacky, so I decided to get my hands dirty and write my own :)

The result is a simplified, web-based Tidy interface that saves your preferences for up to one year using a cookie. The options have been divided up into two categories, Simple and Advanced, and contain only the features that the average web designer will find useful. You can paste raw HTML code or a URL to fetch a remote webpage for cleaning. I call it Dirty Markup :)

Dirty Markup was built using jQuery and jQuery UI, so I had to take advantage of their accordion menu, slider, and their awesome CSS framework. Check it out and tell me what you think. I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions.

How does it work? You start by defining editable regions on each webpage using class attributes. Once you add your website to the CMS, Surreal will FTP into your web server, download the webpage, detect the regions you’ve made editable, and provide an intuitive editing interface for your users (“editors”). When they’re done editing, they can preview their changes live or publish the page back to the server. A complete history, including all revisions of every page edited, is available for up to 30 days. Surreal even offers a full-featured, web-based FTP file manager that lets you organize files and folders on your website with ease.

Why host it remotely? With nothing to download, install, or update, Surreal CMS is one of the easiest CMS solutions to setup and maintain. Worried about speed? Surreal relies heavily on AJAX and handles the brunt of the work with client-side scripting. These scripts get cached in your browser, meaning there are less files to download and less data to transfer each time a page refreshes. This leads to much faster load times. In fact, compared to most installable CMS products on the market, Surreal CMS is just as fast…and often faster.

The service was designed for Web designers to purchase and resell as their own solution. With a Designer Account, editors (i.e. your clients) will login to “The CMS” at edit-content.com and see your company’s logo and theme. No mention of “Surreal CMS” is made to them, making this the perfect solution for those clients with small websites.

Surreal CMS currently offers a Free Account, which lets you to manage up to three websites at no charge. If you sign up for a Designer Account, you’ll pay $25 USD per month (or $275 per year) and receive unlimited websites plus the ability to brand Surreal CMS as your own content management solution.

For more information, or to sign up for your free account, visit the Surreal CMS website.

In the next few weeks, Surreal CMS will be officially released to the public. This is the first of a number of services that ABS will offer, with hopes of making many lives easier through creative, effective, and intuitive Web-based applications.

To all of our clients, readers, and friends: Thank you for all of your support over the last year and a half. Without your patronage, insight, and encouragement, A Beautiful Site would not be where it is today. I look forward to working with all of you for many years to come.

Auto-stripping Your Site on CSS Naked Day

You don’t have to stay up until midnight on April 8th waiting to upload your entire website just to honor CSS Naked Day. Dustin has provided a list of Tools & Plugins on the CSS Naked Day homepage. Of course, I wouldn’t be content without a JavaScript equivalent to all of those server-side scripts.

Removing Styles Using JavaScript

This is a method I developed that lets you strip your site of stylesheets without requiring any server-side scripting technology (i.e. PHP, ASP, CF, etc.). Why? Because some sites don’t use server-side scripting technologies and/or some people may not be comfortable with writing server-side code.

To make it happen, add this function inside the head section of each page and invoke the celebrateCSSNakedDay() function. (This is, of course, assuming that you are <link>-ing to your stylesheets.)

<script type="text/javascript">
// CSS Naked Day!
// Visit naked.dustindiaz.com for details
function celebrateCSSNakedDay(date) {
    var d = new Date();
    if( (d.getMonth() + 1) + '/' + d.getDate() + '/' + d.getFullYear() == date ) {
        var i, a;
        for( i = 0; (a = document.getElementsByTagName("link")[i]); i++ ) {
            if( a.getAttribute("rel").indexOf("style") != -1 ) a.disabled = true;
        }
    }
}
</script>

One way to invoke celebrateCSSNakedDay() is to add a window.onload event:

window.onload = function() {
    celebrateCSSNakedDay('4/9/2008');
}

Alternatively, you can call it inline:

<body onload="celebrateCSSNakedDay('4/9/2008');">

You may have noticed that CSS Naked Day technically lasts for 48 hours (one international day). This poses a problem for most server-side scripts that rely on “server time” to calculate the entire 48 hour duration. With a JavaScript solution like the one above, the script relies on the client’s time which, if set properly, will coincide with the user’s local time zone.

Therefore, websites that use the JavaScript solution will only strip styles for users on April 9th, current to their local time.

I have always been an avid reader of A List Apart. They never fail to produce really great articles in regards to every aspect of web design. When I first saw an advertisement for An Event Apart online, I was stoked. I gathered all the information possible and practically begged my employer to fund the trip. A few weeks later, it was said and done. On March 26^th and 27^th I was in Boston listening to some of the web’s greatest voices. It was awesome. No, that’s an understatement. It was incredible!

The Hotel

The conference was held at the Marriott Copley Place, where I stayed on the 33rd floor. The rooms were very nice, the food services were excellent, and the location was perfect — walking distance to anything you could possibly need and a Shaw’s 24-hour supermarket across the street. Nice.

Day 1

On the first day I got to put some familiar names with faces. Specifically Jeffrey Zeldman (zeldman.com, A List Apart, happy cog), Eric Meyer (meyerweb.com), and Dan Cederholm (SimpleBits). Other speakers who spoke that day were Jason Santa Maria (jasonsantamaria.com) on design, Steve Krug (sensible.com) on usability, and Andrew Kirkpatrick (Adobe) on accessibility.

Lunch was sponsored by Adobe and the opening night party was sponsored by Media Temple at Restaurant 33. I hear everyone had a killer time, but due to a stomach bug I wasn’t able to attend the party. ~ sigh ~

I did get a chance to speak with Dan Cederholm, however. He signed my copy of Bulletproof Web Design and we talked briefly about running a web design business. Dan’s a great guy. His willingness to talk with you and his attitude towards those who are interested in the web really impressed me. I hope I have an opportunity to meet with him again in the future.

Day 2

On the second day I got to meet Molly E. Holzshlag (molly.com), who has authored over 30-something books about the the web and currently works for Microsoft. Specifically, on the IE7 team. Her speech was entitled, “Building Better Browsers”. After she spoke, I had a chance to meet with her one-on-one for a while. We talked about some of the issues that Microsoft had to face to get IE7 up to speed with the web standards movement. In a nutshell, I’m happy to say that my opinion of Microsoft’s recent efforts to improve IE7 has changed for the better. She also assured me that gamma corrections in PNGs is “on the way”. That put a smile on my face.

Other speakers on Day 2 included Cameron Moll (cameronmoll.com) on design, Ethan Marcotte (sidesh0w.com) on web standards, Eric Meyer on CSS and IE7, and Jeffrey Zeldman on selling design.

We wrapped up the second day with critiques. A lot of people submitted websites to be critiqued by the speakers, but only a handful were chosen to be reviewed. I didn’t submit a site for this…I don’t know why.

Afterthoughts

An Avent Apart was an experience I won’t soon forget. It was worth every penny (even if I had paid for it out of my own pocket). Next time, I think it would be good to see a bit more on design and possibly some hands-on activities. I really liked having the opportunity to meet some of the speakers in person. It was also nice to find out that my understanding of good web practice was on par with the rest of the world.

A special thanks goes out to all the speakers from An Event Apart, Boston.